Compassion's Compass

Strategies for Developing Insight, Kindness, and Empathy

by Wilson C. Hurley, LCSW

Supporting Helping Professionals

Helping professionals—like social workers, care givers and first responders—can all experience compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue can cause stress, emotional depletion, and lack of energy.  One way to prevent or overcome compassion fatigue is to build-up your mental/emotional resilience using some simple but powerful mind training techniques.

Read the Book

 

You can order your copy from the publisher >> here.

 

A book about COMPASS called Compassion’s Compass, Strategies for Developing Insight, Kindness, and Empathy written by Wilson C. Hurley, LCSW is now available from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. It contains details about the history, procedures, and research supporting COMPASS along with a handbook for helping professionals to aid in identifying and preventing compassion fatigue.

HH the 14th Dalai Lama wrote a foreword to the book in which he says, “Compassion’s Compass, Strategies for Developing Kindness and Insight, by Wilson C. Hurley, explains how to develop basic human values such as patience, mindfulness, and kindness without touching any particular religious belief. It is accessible to all regardless of age or belief. I commend the author for his hard work and hope that readers will find this book helpful.”

More information about the release of this book will be posted here as it becomes available.

Definition

COMPASS stands for Compassion and Analytical Selective-focus Skills. Selective-focus skills constitute an emerging discipline within cognitive-behavioral therapies and can be used to shape thoughts and moods. COMPASS contains a series of mental exercises designed to cultivate and enhance compassionate insight.

Not Culture Bound

The core skills of COMPASS are drawn from Tibetan Mind Training texts. However, any cultural and/or religious content has been eliminated in order to make them accessible to people of any belief system and they have been adapted for a diverse audience in order to facilitate their use in a wide variety of settings.

Adaptable Traditional Methods

Some reasons for using the Tibetan traditions of mental development include that they are:
  • Particularly well thought out in their sequence and logic
  • Easily secularized and adaptable for diverse audiences
  • Being empirically studied at Emory and Stanford Universities with emerging data supporting their effectiveness for generating compassion.
CLOSLER Magazine article:
Finding your way to compassion satisfaction, (CLOSLER Magazine—“Moving us closer to Osler”) Practicing strategies that renew compassion will allow you to care for patients more effectively.
The COMPASS icon above is a link to the article.
A short article:
...about COMPASS, relevant research, and an outline of how to use it to train school children in methods to develop mindful compassion can be found online. The COMPASS icon above is a link to the article
Practice guide:
A guide for daily practice of COMPASS can be downloaded here. By printing it 2-sided along the short edge, you can fold it in the middle in order to form a pamphlet.

Stress Article

Teacher Well Being and Stress Management

Thriving Together

How to Be Patient When You're Angry

Secularity Article

Mindfulness in Schools: Ensuring Secularity

Learn to foster well-being and compassion resilience!

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